Monday October 24, 2011

From Creamer Media in Johannesburg, I’m Brad Dubbelman

Making headlines:

Transport Minister Sibusiso Ndebele has ordered the South African National Roads Agency Limited to halt all road project processes related to the tolling of national roads, his department said yesterday. "Good infrastructure is a necessity for a better future for our country, but this requirement must not leave our people even poorer," he said in a statement. All spheres of government should be part of a consultative process with all affected parties, he said. 42 electronic toll gates have been erected on the Gauteng N1, N3, N12, N17, R21 and R24. The tolls cover a distance of about 185km.

Libya's new rulers declared the country freed from Muammar Gaddafi's 42 years of one-man rule, saying the "Pharaoh of the times" was in history's garbage bin and a future of democracy and reconciliation beckoned. But as thousands in Benghazi heard the authorities announce "liberation", Gaddafi's rotting body, unburied and on public display in Misrata, was casting a shadow over the nation he once dominated.
Some fear National Transitional Council chief Mustafa Abdel Jalil, a mild-mannered former justice minister, will find it hard to impose his will on his fractious revolutionary alliance.

Tunisian election officials counted the votes after the country's first free election, ten months on from the moment Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in a protest that started the Arab Spring uprisings. Most forecasts point to a moderate Islamist party emerging with the biggest share of the vote, an outcome that worries secularists and could be replicated in other Arab States when they hold their own post-Arab Spring elections. Turnout in the vote, for an assembly which will sit for one year and draft a new constitution, was more than 90% – a mark of Tunisians' determination to exercise their new democratic rights after decades of repression.

Also making headlines:
Thousands of Moroccans demonstrated in cities across the country yesterday, calling for a boycott of early Parliamentary polls next month whose outcome will be key to the future of reforms crafted by the royal palace.
And, government and the private sector must rise above strategising and planning and start to soil their hands in the fight against corruption, Public Service and Administration Minister Richard Baloyi said at the third Business Unity South Africa anticorruption forum.

That’s a roundup of news making headlines today.